Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

  “I called her a newswhore,” Hodge said. He stole a breath that pained him. “Said she instilled fear, encouraged white flight, sharpened needling noses for misfortune. She maintained she did her job; I told her she shits in her own sandbox. She threw a Vodka Collins. Look. I was an SOB. I recall my honest moments.”

  “Lots of folks like her on TV.”

  “They like her face; it’s a nice one.”

  “And it’s on TV. So you gonna press charges?”

  “Against my love of liquor? My smart mouth?”

  “Hell,” Dell said. “Call when you get out. I’ll buy if you keep that piehole shut.”

  The day faded on him, bed backlit with fluorescent light, window illumined with pollen-yellow dark. Dell had left a cutting of lavender from his wife’s garden in a styrofoam cup. Hodge reached for it, hand steady—phenobarbital, benzos, Dilaudid. He’d have to ask a nurse once he tracked the call button.

  * * *

  “Ain’t you got AC?”

  “Old car.”

  “How old you got to get for no AC?” Somehow, she’d worked her skirt above her underwear, which was plain white cotton. “I do it all now,” she said.

  “As opposed to when?”

  “You’re a funny one,” she said.

  Cars fled past, watery sounds rushing in, nowhere to stand. He’d swum in the Pacific once, sand shifting underfoot, which unsettled him. The rest of the day he made drip castles on the beach with Lilah while Rachel dived at curling waves.

  “I said we weren’t happening,” Hodge said.

  The woman slung her arm onto the top of the seat. A car pulled from behind them, but the T-bird remained, headlights shuttered against the coming dark.

  “I got a four-year-old,” the woman said. “Want to fuck you some of that?”

  “What?”

  “Charge you more, but that sweet young body? Honest goodness costs.”

  “Get the fuck out.”

  “Honeydew, you need you sweet and pure but can’t find it. She do you right, now.”

  “Get. The fuck. Out of my car.”

  “Jesus ran with our kind.” She drew a forefinger down the back of his ear. “Scripture says.”

  “Goddamnit.”

  Already she’d slammed the door, though, blending into blue dark. Legs trembling, Hodge got the car into first. The cassettes were gone from the floorboard; no big deal except for the Julia Lee, a bootleg from Milton’s Tap Room in 1949. Hodge’s old friend who’d transferred the recording off a Tefifon was dead of AIDS; the lover had finagled through the courts his friend’s property, then trashed it.

  “Jesus wept,” Hodge said. The T-bird floated past him, the prostitute on the passenger’s side flicking ash from a filtered blunt. Hodge let out the clutch and eased into the lane. He tracked the silhouettes of risen birds on the taillights.

  * * *

  “You did what now?” Dell said.

  “Spent the night.”

  “In your car.”

  “North side of what’s left of Fairyland,” Hodge said. “No numbers on the door. Streetlamps’re out.”

  Dell poured milk onto frosted flakes. Gloria and Georgia had come to the table in pajamas, blue eyes shifting over their cereal. “Darkness makes for good business,” Dell said.

  “I got to get back there.”

  “For cassettes?” Dell had his spoon halfway to his mouth. “You ain’t got to do nothing.”

  “If there’s some girl—” Hodge glanced at Gloria and Georgia. In a cornsilk-green nightgown Elaine leaned on the kitchen counter, coffee pot in hand. “It’s got to be stopped.”

  “Stop what, Daddy?” Georgia said. The elder at age ten, she called police work obscene; Dell agreed.

  “More coffee, Hodge?” Elaine said, but she poured before he answered.

  “If—” Dell worked his cereal to the side of his mouth. “Then it ain’t your business. If they don’t, still ain’t. Make it yours, you got a death wish.”

  “I know the neighborhood. I read a route there.”

  “Meters? Twenty years ago? Sweet-faced college boy? Over a case of Little Kings once, you waxed rhapsodic about some joint that made urinal cakes on the east side. All because you’d never considered some souls actually had to make urinal cakes.”

  “What’s a urinal cake?”

  “Gloria,” Elaine said.

  “Ain’t twenty years ago, Hodge,” Dell said. “Know why your piece-of-shit car’s missing its antennae?”

  Elaine set the pot back on the burner. “Dell.”

  “He drives it every day.”

  “Little pitchers,” Elaine said. “Big ears.”

  “Worse on TV.”

  “Drunk broke it, I guess.”

  “Crackhead,” Dell said. “Needs a pipe to smoke what-all. Crack, smack, the next big thing.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, picked up his coffee, then set it down. “Fairyland, right? Chain-linked scrub taking over coasters and rip-off amusements? What was it? Fifty cents to get in? Joint nickel-and-dimed you for everything after. Their double drive-in gave it a go, though. Remember? Skin flicks and Disney.” Dell snapped his fingers twice. “What was that ad before they went under?”

  “Fairyland is Fun.”

  “I don’t care if you spent a night stargazing and tracking fireflies. Some shit’ll be watching you.”

  Elaine cinched her robe.

  “There’s a line, Hodge. You know that. Troost. Prospect. It’s a gray line, but it’s a line. They shoot at EMTs even. God knows what’d come of your lily-white self.”

  Hodge placed his mug on the table. “Somebody’s got to do something.”

  “You ain’t somebody.”

  Elaine snatched up Dell’s cup and dropped it in the dishwater.

  “What I mean is—ain’t nobody the somebody. Look. You can’t know that was just some talk. Weird her working so far off the avenue too.”

  “Girls,” Elaine said. “Go play.”

  “I’m not finished,” Georgia said.

  “You can’t just hear about something like this,” Hodge said.

  Pushing back from the table, Dell set his cap square on his head. “You hear worse. It just don’t sit in your car and make conversation.”

  Hodge turned the handle of his coffee cup toward him.

  Dell kissed his girls, his wife. He bent over Hodge and kissed him on the cheek, then patted his shoulder twice. The girls giggled, and Elaine shushed them. “Friends do me no good,” Dell said, “if they ain’t still standing.”

  * * *

  Hodge made calls: sex crimes unit, social services, departments of blah, blah, and blah; each conversation curled back on him:

  “Now how are you related?”

  “I’m not. There’s maybe a child involved. The woman stole some stuff; that might be proof enough. You understand?”

  “And you have the address?”

  “Tags, make of car. What I believe is the address. Empty lots all around, no house number. Didn’t you get this down?”

  “Sir, there’s really not much we can do in this situation.”

  “Situation?”

  “I understand that you’re frustrated. We just can’t do much with this.”

  “I’ve been misinformed,” Hodge said. “I thought your organization helped people.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You ain’t the only one,” Hodge said.

  * * *

  He’d run the route six times in three years. So dismal a neighborhood no full-time reader wanted it: abandoned houses, copper pipe and wire ripped from walls; roaming dogs, swollen trash bags in alleys; blowflies. It took two hours, though—if he ran—for eight hours pay and offered luminous moments: scent of frying bacon; Howard Tate blasting through clapboards; once, hems of lace curtains huffed out an open bay window into a tangle of smoke tree and flowerless lilac, and Billie Holiday sang from a record stuck on a scratch: Willow weep, willow weep, willow weep—for me.

  Then there w
as the woman who’d stepped onto the porch as Hodge tromped over Virginia creeper running along a limestone retaining wall. “Excuse me,” she called. Down the street a mower started, died. One hand tucked behind her, she wore a flimsy white halter, calf-length jeans. Her hair was shellacked and sculpted. “You the gas man?”

  “No, ma’am. Kansas City Power & Light.”

  “You the water man?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Oh, you the light man.”

  “Yeah. I’m the light man.”

  She turned her bar top–brown back to him. “Can you tie this?” Down the street the mower sputtered, revved. She pinched the drawstrings of her top between her thumb and forefinger. Hodge glanced around for witnesses. Cicadas squawked from a catalpa.

  “I guess,” he said. He climbed worn stairs, the woman smiling down on him. Behind the front screen a daytime game show blathered from a black-and-white. He sensed someone in the dim back room.

  She stared at Hodge from over her shoulder. “How old’re you?”

  Hodge clutched his meter-reading pad between his knees. He wished she’d step clear of the door. “Nineteen.” He tied the strings and hot-stepped off the porch.

  “You in a hurry, cutie?” she said.

  Near the route’s close a green frame house stood. Grapevine tangled over an arbor at the entrance of the walk; honeysuckle wove through a chain-link fence. Meter in a stone basement. An old woman lived there, vestige of a neighborhood as the developer had intended, and she always insisted he stay for ice tea and a ham sandwich of homemade bread and meat cut from the bone. Hodge ate at the kitchen counter while in a quavering voice she spoke of lost days. Her husband had been a cabinetmaker. “Folks here worked. Not like these ones let their houses go to rot. Can’t even mow the lawns. Fairyland back when kept those kind out until they threw a fit at the gates. Before you were born probably.”

  “I was alive,” he said. He tolerated her bigoted rants. People rarely said what they thought.

  Once, she took his face between her hands. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “A good boy.”

  He was not. Three blocks off Metcalf, on the Kansas side, down a sweetgum-lined street of board-and-bat ranch houses with cedar-shake roofs, Hodge had shouldered open a privacy-fence gate to find a woman laid out naked, oiled and shining on a wicker lounge chair. She sat up, arms across her breasts. “Just a minute,” she said, and Hodge shut the gate. When she let him in the yard, a peach-colored bath towel was wrapped around her. He apologized. She pointed to the meter above the air-conditioning unit; peppermint had gone to flower below it.

  “Hot,” she said as he scratched down numbers, then he turned. Shell-colored combs held up her auburn hair, wisps loose on her neck.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Come in for a cold drink,” she said. “Please?”

  At the kitchen counter she poured lemonade over crushed ice and added a sprig of mint he had to work around as he drank.

  “Thirsty?” She poured him another and stood too close. Her towel had slid down some, and when she let it drop and lifted the glass from his hand, he knew he’d chosen this as the hapless way of his first time. He clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. He visited the house twice more before one dusk he pulled up outside. She sat at the dining room table, a husband in a blue oxford across from her, a boy on either side. He lost her name, her number; she’d written them on a Wrigley’s wrapper.

  But the Fairyland route had stayed with him. He drove it four times before he parked outside the green frame house; the roof had collapsed. Thistle, poke, and dock had overrun the yard, and in wild violet at the edge of the walk a gray kitten crouched. The arbor was gone. Hodge toed open the gate, and the creature fled. Palming sweat from his neck, he stepped to the porch as a car crept past, bass line rattling the trunk, theremin whining through the beat. He turned the front door knob, and a cat scrambled over the kitchen windowsill and past the corner drainpipe. Hodge slapped his hand to his chest.

  After he passed the house where the T-bird had vanished last night into an attached garage, he parked three vacant lots to the north, screwing his rear- and sideview mirrors for a clear view: small split-level board-and-bat painted brick red, ornate cream-colored ironwork over the storm door and windows, fertilized lawn, clipped grass, edged walk. No bushes or flowers, but a residence that avoided complaints and Housing Authority violations. On his passenger’s side a slab stairway led to foxtail gone to seed and flowering Queen Anne’s lace and a thick white oak that had once shaded a house. Two blocks ahead stood yellow stucco-coated storefronts, three windows nailed over with plyboard, one intact, a corner joint with a hand-lettered sign over the entrance—POPS SUNDRIES. The door was flaking gray paint.

  He’d emptied his bank account—$2,100. If a girl was indeed there he intended to hand over the cash and get her to someone who could help. If Mama made trouble, or the pimp, Hodge would talk his way clear. And if he could at least say the girl existed, maybe the authorities would do something. He might get his tapes back too; who’d want them?

  He drank ice water from a Coleman jug. He dozed, sweat; he stuck to the bench seat. Sometimes he patted the bank envelope of cash in his T-shirt pocket. The air-conditioning unit to the red house ran and ran, and he longed for its cold.

  All night the shades stayed drawn. He dreamed a hand touched his forehead as if he were fevered. Mosquitoes raised welts. At blue light he startled, and when sun crested behind the oak an old woman appeared in his rearview mirror. Working a garden hoe for a cane, she shuffled in slippers and an orange robe up the middle of the street, sports section folded in her thigh pocket. At Hodge’s bumper, she studied his plate, mouthing letters and numbers, then pointed his way with the tool. She shook her head and moved on into the neighborhood’s vanishing point.

  At dusk on the second night, the T-bird backed from the garage, and Hodge ducked as it passed, waiting to follow until the taillights turned toward Prospect. He lost the boat at Independence Avenue but checked parking lots of hourly rate motels and cruised from Paseo to North Terrace Park. Waiting on a red, Vietnamese boys in a Datsun with a Bondoed tailfin tossed a lit cigarette through his open window, and when Hodge flipped it back, the driver waggled a snub-nosed .38 at him.

  At his rental, he showered, shaved, changed. He drank a glass of milk and brushed his teeth. Come first light he parked at the steps of the vacant lot, but held to his steering wheel as if the car might drift from under him. The old thirst had returned: bourbon, rye, chilled can of Black Label even. When cicadas began squawking, he stepped from the car and headed for the storefront.

  A bell pinged. Motes drifted in amber light angling through the window, and shadows shifted in the farthest corner. On his right, the counter led to a polyester blanket nailed over an arched doorway, pale-blue fabric stained down the left-hand side; sixty-watt light illumined the frayed edges. Another shadow shifted, shape of salvaged gargoyle, winged and waiting. Metal shelving ran perpendicular to the counter: chips, Valomilk, motor oil, gardening gloves, Sterno, pseudoephedrine. At the end of one row stood a glass-faced fridge of whole milk, Sunny Delight, and thirty-two-ounce bottles of Bud and Schlitz.

  An unshaven man with a monk’s fringe of gray curls appeared from behind the curtain. His skin matched the varnished counter. “Goddamnit,” he said, and snatched a sawed-off broomstick, whacking it at the door jamb. A brown thing flashed across the far endcaps, tailed by a scrape and a bang.

  “Cat door,” the old man said. “Wife’s cat. Now I ain’t got no cat and ain’t got no wife—God rest her mendacious soul. I nail it, deck screw it, nut and bolt it; that boy kicks it in quiet as Death. Dorito thief. Nacho cheese.” He shelved the broomstick under the register.

  “A boy fits through a cat door?” Hodge said.

  “Cane-thin. Grease-slick. One big cat too. Was.” He scratched at the sleeve of his V-neck. “Crackbaby, they call him. Like hell. Baby’s a baby. Shit’s a shit. Mama’s moved on to meth.�
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  “He belong to that house down the street?”

  “You hunting something?”

  “Cold drink.”

  The old man waved to a Coca-Cola coffin fridge by the door. Vess cans, tallboys, and malt liquors bobbed in ice water. Hodge hefted a Budweiser, its cold weight a comfort. He loosed a breath, then dropped the beer and fished out a cola.

  “Fetch me a black cherry, boy.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Black. Cherry.”

  Hodge set two dripping cans on the counter and tugged a tube of peanuts from a rack.

  “Sit there for days on end, and that’s all you eat?”

  “I ain’t hungry.”

  The old man cracked his Vess. “What is it you are?”

  “I ain’t wanting trouble.”

  “Never matters what you want.”

  Hodge nodded. “I read meters at this store years ago. Vess was a quarter then.”

  “Freeway gonna be your Memory Lane soon enough. Tear shit down, lay a road. Improves the neighborhood, they say.” The man drained his can. He laid his hands flat on the counter, seeming to study the woodgrain, then belched. “You a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Ain’t no geeker; ain’t no perv.” He lifted his gaze. “You some spook. I see through you to the wall. Best float on out, spook.”

  Hodge took the envelope from his breast pocket; he held out a five.

  “Keep that shit,” the old man said. He raised a hand as if blessing Hodge, then pinched up the broomstick and swung it like a pendulum. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. He pushed back the blanket, sidestepped the cover, and let it drop. Hodge abandoned the five on the counter.

  * * *

  Tossing the tube of peanuts onto the front seat, he leaned against the driver’s-side door, arms outstretched on the hot roof, hands around the can from which he sipped. He watched the house. Behind him undergrowth stirred, and at the opposite walk’s edge a calico kitten appeared. Hodge tugged his damp T-shirt from his chest, and the animal vanished as if snatched away. Hodge turned back to his Vess. The boy from the store had wandered into the widespread shade of the oak. Thick switch in hand, he stood amid Queen Anne’s lace and foxtail, eyeing the ground before him. He whipped three times at something, then glanced at Hodge before resuming his work, weeds around him trembling with each slice of the air.